Mislaid

A friend recommended this book because it takes place in my home state of Virginia, but, as I’ve discovered previously, just because I’m familiar with the setting doesn’t necessarily make it a great read. (See https://yourbrainonbooks.blogspot.com/2016/09/commonwealth.html)

Published in 2015, Mislaid by Nell Zink, who grew up in rural Virginia, may be one of the most bizarre novels I’ve ever read. The plot itself is bizarre enough, as a lesbian student at a women’s college marries the resident gay male poet and bears two children by him.  She finally leaves him, taking their daughter with her, and hides out in rural Virginia changing their names and passing themselves off as black, not for the same reason as Rachel Dolezal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal), but because she doesn’t want her husband to find her.  This unfolds in just the first three chapters, and so it continues with one bizarre episode after another.

Set during the 1960’s, serious issues, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, power and privilege, are addressed, but they are somewhat overshadowed by the bizarre plot and outlandish humor.  There are laugh-out-loud lines on almost every page, which makes for great entertainment but distracts from the social commentary. 

Here’s a small sample of some of those LOL lines:

“Around age fourteen, it got more complicated. She informed her best friend, Debbie, that she intended to join the army out of high school. She knew Debbie from Girl Scout camp. Debbie was from Richmond, a large and diverse city. ‘You’re a thespian,’ Peggy heard her say. ‘Get away from me.’ Debbie picked up her blanket and moved to the other side of the room…Betrayal. Debbie never spoke to her again. Peggy told her mother.

            ‘A thespian,” her mother said, bemused. ‘Well, darling, everybody gets crushes.’ Her mother was from the generation that thought a girl’s first love is always a tomboyish older girl…Her mother suspected her of having a girlfriend, already and sent off for brochures to Radcliffe. She didn’t believe in coeducation, but her daughter’s plight called for desperate measures.”

“To look at him, Temple was about as black as a person could get, as though the school were hoping to pack as much blackness as possible into each ‘token black’ seat in each of his successive integrated classrooms.  Initially he was chosen his mannerly comportment and tidy clothes and resented only for making it impossible for his classmates to win at Eraser Walk.  The eraser nestled in his hair like an egg in a nest.  He could have hopped to the blackboard on one foot.  The class voted never to play Eraser Walk again. One by one, his superior achievements were acknowledged with surrender. He called it, raising the white flag’.”

“The ghost-like, flaxen-haired black child was almost a matter of civic pride. They hoped she would stay in the county and marry a light-skinned, blue-eyed man to found one of those conversation-piece dynasties.”

“He was the democratically elected head prosecutor of the city of Charlottesville.  Since victims outnumber criminals, he favored victims. He knew there is no such thing as a victimless crime. Whatever casual drug users might say. A person whose harmless actions are criminalized becomes a victim of the law. That paradox helped him out every day by showing him the unreality of his job.”

“Still, she insisted on living with Temple, explaining to Lee that with him around she could always be assured of finding leftover pizza in the refrigerator. She would never have to cook. Lee admitted it was a strong argument.”

Humor can sometimes mask offensive stereotypes, and such is the case with this novel, despite its ostensibly liberal treatment of social issues.  I grew up in Virginia during the 1960’s and never experienced anything approximating the world of this novel, though the depiction of class rang true.  So, read it if you will, but don’t take it as a realistic representation of Virginia or the South in general.

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

Anything by Flannery O’Connor, including this short story published in 1953, should come with a warning label: “Proceed with Caution,” or something to that effect.  Especially if you are inclined to see the best in people and to view life with a more sunny than grim outlook, you might want to gird your loins before entering into her world, which has been variously described as “gothic,” “cynical,” and downright “grotesque.”  That this world is represented in a rather matter-of-fact manner makes it all the more hair-raising.

The title of this story actually comes from a popular blues song, performed by the likes of Bessie Smith, lamenting her no-good, cheating, abusive man and urging those who are lucky enough to have a “good man” to “Hug him every morning, kiss him ev’ry night…Cause a good man nowadays sure is hard to find.” 

In Flannery O’Connor’s story, the line is stated by Red Sammy, the owner of a barbecue spot, who laments that “These days you don’t know who to trust”:  “Everything is getting terrible.  I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”

An ordinary family, husband and wife, three children, and a grandmother, are on a road trip to Florida.  When they stop for lunch, the grandmother and Red Sammy commiserate together about the sad state of the world.  Earlier, when the family vacation is being planned, the grandmother warns against heading to Florida.  A escaped convict, called The Misfit, is “aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida.”  Overruled by the rest of the family, the grandmother, dressed in her best clothes, takes her seat in the back seat of the car.  “In case of an accident anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”  At Red Sammy’s the grandmother once again brings up The Misfit.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t attact this place right here,” says Sammy’s wife.  Everyone seems to agree, “A good man is hard to find.”

Except for a sideways glance at her husband when Sammy’s wife states, “It isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you can trust…And I don’t count nobody out of that, not nobody,” everyone seems to agree that the law-abiding, upstanding, respectable family vacationers and roadside business owners are among the “good” people on God’s green earth.

Yet, throughout the story, the family members are disrespectful, rude, and downright mean to each other.  The children talk back to their grandmother and the parents do not scold or correct them; the parents ignore the grandmother, who is herself a shallow, petty, and vain woman; Sammy interrupts his wife and bosses her around.

What does it mean to be “good”? 

Later, after a series of mishaps the family has a car accident and crosses paths with The Misfit.  Murder and mayhem ensue accompanied by a bizarre conversation between the grandmother and The Misfit, in which the grandmother tries to convince him that he truly is a “good” man from “good” family.  (He is not even wearing a shirt.)  “Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The Misfit tells her politely and begins to relate his history.

“I was a gospel singer for a while,” The Misfit said.  “I been most everything.  Been in the arm service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive onct…I even seen a woman flogged….”

He begins to emerge as a kind of Everyman.  Grandmother tells him to pray.  He says he was imprisoned for killing his father, but claims he did not do it, or, at least, does not remember doing it.  Having lost all faith in justice, he has decided it doesn’t matter what he does or how he lives.  The grandmother begins to murmur “Jesus, Jesus,” but it’s not clear if she is praying or cursing.  Such is the ambiguity of the story.  Is the Misfit truly an innocent man who has been twisted into evil by an unjust system of justice?  Is the grandmother truly a faithful Christian woman trying to save a sinner or is she using religion to manipulate a murderer in order to save her life?

In a sudden moment when The Misfit seems close to tears as he claims if only he had known the truth about Jesus, “I wouldn’t be like I am now,” the grandmother reaches out to him, exclaiming, “Why, you’re one of my babies…You’re one of my own children!”  The Misfit recoils “as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest.” 

We know from O’Connor’s own testimony that her work is a representation of her Catholic theology; as such, this scene is interpreted as a moment of divine grace when The Misfit appears to show remorse and the grandmother, recognizing his capacity for salvation, expresses compassion for his soul.  In this interpretation, the grandmother, despite the foolishness and superficiality of her life, reveals her own capacity for salvation.  The image of the grandmother “in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at a cloudless sky” is taken as evidence of her final deliverance into the arms of God.  The Misfit, on the other hand, has rejected the offer of grace, reacting to the grandmother as if she were an evil “snake” and reverting to his own evil, murderous ways.

So, why does O’Connor present this message with such ambiguity?  From another perspective, The Misfit is merely toying with an old woman’s desperate religious appeals and the grandmother’s supposed moment of compassion is yet another attempt to use religion to manipulate The Misfit into sparing her life.  Her image in death could just as well be seen as evidence that she is just as ridiculous dead as she was alive.

“She would have been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” the Misfit says.  Is this his recognition that it takes the shock of extreme circumstances to open a shallow person to divine grace or is it just evidence of his own perversion? 

When his companion Bobbie Lee says, “Some fun!” and The Misfit replies, “Shut up, Bobbie Lee…It’s no real pleasure in life,” is that evidence that he now renounces an earlier statement that there is “No pleasure but meanness” or is it a nihilistic rejection of any form of value in life, even the value of “fun.”

The one thing Flannery O’Connor is not ambiguous about is the sad state of the world and human nature.  It is a fallen world, a perversely fallen world in which there is not only the obvious evil of violence and murder but the everyday evil of foolish pride, petty meanness, and shallow faith. 

Why is she so ambiguous about the possibility of redemption?  If we take her at her word, then perhaps her fiction is intended to provide a shock of extreme circumstances designed to test our own capacity to recognize the potential for divine grace available to even the worst of us.

Another possibility is that underlying her own Catholic faith is the doubt and fear that there is no hope of redemption for this truly fallen world.

In any case, Flannery O’Connor uses dark humor and grotesque comedy to make this fallen world, redeemable or not, highly entertaining.   A few years ago there was an ad for fitness equipment that used the slogan, “A Hard Man Is Good to Find.”  That’s what happens when English majors go to work for advertising companies.  One imagines that O’Connor would have enjoyed that ad immensely.

  

A Christmas Carol

I’ve seen it so many times on stage, screen, and TV, but I just read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol  for the first time.  I was immediately struck by its combination of gothic tale, light comedy, and conversion narrative.

Originally published in 1843 A Christmas Carol is subtitled “Being a Ghost Story of Christmas,” thus introducing a contrast between the darkness of the gothic tradition and the coming of the light celebrated at Christmas and at the Winter Solstice.  If the Scrooge of the first part of the story represents the darkest time of year and the world before Christ, then the Scrooge of the last part represents the return of the sun and the birth of the Christian savior.

The humor is introduced early as Marley is pronounced “as dead as a doornail” and a full paragraph is devoted to light-hearted discussion of the somewhat irreverent simile.  Comic caricature combines with melodrama as the rest of the story unfolds, following the well-known patterns of gothic tale and conversion narrative.

The gothic plot typically begins in rational reality, proceeds to an encounter with the irrational, and concludes with either destruction or escape.  Thus does the materialistic, greedy, hard-hearted Scrooge, after encountering the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, and the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, confront his doomed life of avarice, bitterness, and loneliness.  In this version of the gothic tale, the hero can choose his fate, and Scrooge chooses to reject his doom in favor of a redeemed life of generosity, open-heartedness, community, and love.

The secular ghost story thus converges with the religious story of conversion and redemption.  The traditional Christian narrative typically begins with a sinner, proceeds to a conversion experience, including confession and atonement, and concludes with salvation.  Although A Christmas Carol is more secular than religious, it parallels the traditional Christian story, which underlies Scrooge’s conversion to the Christmas spirit.

While observing the conventions of both traditions, Dickens lightens the melodrama with humorous exaggeration and jocularity, making it impossible to take either ghosts or religion too seriously.  The essence of the Christmas “spirit” in A Christmas Carol is human, not supernatural: human compassion, love, celebration, and merry-making.

A sub-plot is the story of the Cratchitt family, struggling in poverty but bound together in love.  Their story also loosely follows a familiar pattern, the success story, which begins in hard-working, virtuous poverty, proceeds to opportunity, and concludes with success.  In this case the opportunity is the windfall of Scrooge’s conversion, which leads to a raise in salary for Bob Cratchitt and life-saving care for Tiny Tim.

Part of the popularity of Dickens’ classic is its use of familiar, popular narratives; part of it is the sentimentalism; part of it is the humor; and part of it is the secularism.  As familiar and popular as is the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke, it is the secular message that transcends any particular religion and speaks to the non-religious as well as the religious, for all can appreciate the human story of redemption.

There is a political message, as well.  As Republicans currently seek to protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor and speak cynically of freeloaders at the public trough when it is their own policies that have reduced opportunity and lowered wages, it is hard not to see Scrooge as a hard-hearted Republican hoarder of wealth greatly in need, not only of honoring Christmas in his heart and keeping it all year, but also of a political form of redemption. May it be so.  And may it be a Merry Christmas!

"Fiction"

Someone once said that an Alice Munro short story is as complicated as any novel.  This 2009 story is proof positive.  O. Henry could have learned a lot from her (see http://yourbrainonbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/gift-of-magi.html). 

 “Fiction” can be read  as the tragic story of a woman on a constant quest for ego-enhancement, for whom relationships are a means to the end of her own fulfillment, or it can be read as a comic story of a woman who repeatedly makes herself look ridiculous by her own self-importance.

 It can be read as a realistic representation of human experience as a maze of coincidences and intersections, a tangle of relationships, of memories, of forgetting, of recognition and non-recognition, of curiosity of story-telling, of manipulation, of complex motives, of self-creation and re-creation.

 It can be read as an ironic statement on the complexity of human experience, the mixed messages, the missed messages, the strange combination of false successes and real failures, of the reality of unreality and the unreality of reality.

 It can be read as a social commentary on the modern state of relationship roulette, of marriage, adultery, divorce, blended families, same-sex relationships; of individualism, the serial making, breaking and remaking of social ties; of the fragmentation in our social fabric and the fragility of social bonds; of the strange web of interconnectedness with its brokenness, and its mendedness.

 It can be read as the carefully crafted juxtaposition of a story within a story and the asymmetry of two different memories of the same episode from two different perspectives, in which what is marginal in one memory is central in the other.

 It can be read as the universal story of a failed quest for redemption, in which we humans are doomed to a cycle of continual compensation for our imperfections, like Sisyphus forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down once we get it to the top.

 But the story is called “Fiction,” and in the last line the main character imagines turning her disappointing experience into a “funny story.”  Thus the story “Fiction” is framed by references to story-telling, and at the center of the story is another “fictional” story.  Our attention is thus drawn to the relationship between fiction and truth, unreality and reality, to the significance of writing, reading, and the experience of textuality.

 The poet Donald Murray has said that “All writing is autobiography,” and there is a school of literary criticism that seems to say, by turns, that all reading is autobiography and/or that all writing is about writing and/or about reading.  This self-reflexive approach to fiction can begin to feel like a hall of mirrors, which is somewhat how the story “Fiction” feels.

 Alice Munro, who was divorced and remarried, became a writer and book-seller (a somewhat self-reflexive situation in its own right).  Her story “Fiction” is about Joyce, a music teacher, whose husband rejects her for the mother of one of her students.  Later, after Joyce has become the third wife of a college professor and left teaching to become a professional cellist, she crosses paths again with that former student, Christie, who has married the friend of Joyce’s second husband’s son by his first wife.

 As if this tangled maze of relationships were not enough, Christie has just published a book of short stories, one of which, “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), recounts the story of a child whose mother moves in with her music teacher’s husband.  (The title suggests a coming of age story.)

 To the extent that Christie’s story is based on her own experience, her memory of it is very different from Joyce’s memory of the same episode.  Joyce barely remembers the details of Christie’s account (if they actually happened) and certainly had no knowledge, much less memory, of the events from Christie’s perspective.  She had no idea that Christie had been so lovingly attached to her as her music teacher and she has no awareness of having manipulated Christie in order to gain access to details of the relationship between her husband and Christie’s mother, at least as Christie tells it.  The layers of complexity continue to mount.  The hall of mirrors makes it ever more difficult to distinguish between the flesh and blood of reality and the reflections distorted in the mirrors of memory and of fiction.

 We read Alice Munro’s story about Joyce, who reads Christie’s story about the memory of her relationship with Joyce, which Joyce compares with her own memory of Christie.  If all reading (and writing) is autobiography, then all writing (and reading) is memory, and all memory is a distorted mirror image of the reality that actually took place.  Thus all fiction is memory and all memory is fiction.

 In Joyce’s memory Christie is a minor character, whose name Joyce can barely recall.  In Christie’s memory Joyce is a central character, the adored teacher.  Even when, as an adult, Christie realizes how Joyce had “used” her, she is able to forgive because of the beauty of the music and the “love” of the teacher, however false.  “It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person could come of the great unhappiness of another.”

 Joyce is so moved by the story and its conveniently self-justifying (for Joyce) moral that she takes her copy of Christie’s book back to the bookstore (Alice Munro was a book-seller) to have it signed by the author (Alice Munro was a published author).  Despite Joyce’s attempt to draw attention to herself, Christie is utterly oblivious as to who she is.  Memory, it seems, is one thing; recognition is another.

 In the end Joyce is as unimportant to Christie as Christie once was to Joyce.  Just as Christie salvaged her disappointment through fiction, so Joyce attempts to salvage hers by imagining that “This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell someday.”

 Just as Joyce has used Christie to construct a mental “story” of the life her husband was living with Christie’s mother, so Christie uses the memory of Joyce to create her work of fiction, and perhaps Joyce will again use Christie, this time to create her own “funny story.”

 Not only are we all figments of our own imaginations, but we are figments of others’ imaginations, as they are figments of ours.  Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction, the story we tell ourselves and others, become truth.